


When She Speaks, Heaven Shakes

by Miss_M



Category: Akkadian Empire RPF
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Complicated Relationships, Family, Gen, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Incest, Intrigue, Politics, Religion, War, Worship, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 10:21:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27968978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: The truth was still the truth with a little flourish.
Comments: 11
Kudos: 20
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	When She Speaks, Heaven Shakes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [redsnake05](https://archiveofourown.org/users/redsnake05/gifts).



> I own nothing.

A south wind blew when Enheduanna rose in the hour before dawn, performed her ablutions, and set out the accoutrements for the morning worship: the jar of oil, the bowl of fresh water, the small chunk of myrrh in a painted clay pot.

By the time she had completed the ritual and risen from her prostration before the altar, wincing as her aging knees protested the exercise, the wind blew even stronger, dispersing the air’s predawn freshness, carrying into Ur the stench of the mudflats where the river met the Lower Sea. The new day smelled of offal, rotting fish, tanning, and salt. Just such a wind had blown during Enheduanna’s flight from the city more than twenty years past, in the interregnum following her father’s death. Her feet remembered the scratch of thorns, the pain of walking on rocks while she'd fled with only two attendants, seeking sanctuary in one of the cities to the east, in the foothills of the great mountains, where Akkadian control was always more a spoken promise than a law carved into stone.

She took that ill wind for an omen and sent a messenger to the royal palace to wake Prince Naram-Sin.

By the time Naram-Sin arrived, dressed as if he were departing to war – on the handful of occasions that Enheduanna had seen him in recent years, he had struck her as quite vain, even for a prince – and rubbing his eyes with ill humor etched on his face, she was seated in an alcove by an open window, near the fresh air yet out of the worst of the wind, and busy writing.

“May the gods grant you a felicitous day, nephew,” Enheduanna said without raising her eyes from her writing tablet.

“What do you want?” came the sullen reply.

Enheduanna felt a surge of familiar anger in her breast – all of her father’s children had inherited his temper – but she tamped it down. Her stylus moved and _flick, flick_ went the tiny shavings of clay: the sign for grain, the sign for a basket, the sign for coin. The business of running a great temple was never-ending, as she’d learned the hard way.

Still without looking up from her work, she kept her tone pleasant: “I would speak with you and offer you counsel, now that you have attained your full manhood.”

“You summoned me before dawn like a murderer going to his execution. How dare…”

Enheduanna looked up. “This is the Goddess’ house, and you are my guest here. Keep a civil tongue, or I am within my rights to remove it and send you back to your father maimed and good for nothing but to serve as an example to others. Soldiers do not follow mute generals, nor do wives and concubines flock to a man who can neither speak nor sing.”

He wanted to respond with rage, with violence. They always did. But he knew that she was right, and apart from being Inanna’s beloved, Enheduanna was also his aunt, his father’s only sister. Whenever he’d seen Enheduanna in the past, it had been by the light of the moon or the flicker of torches as she’d moved through one ritual or another, stately and inscrutable among the temple’s azure pillars banded with red copper.

He kept silent and glared at her where she sat – in the Goddess’ house, the high priestess did not prostrate herself before any mortal. She noticed how Naram-Sin’s features looked still only half formed, like a loaf of bread removed too soon from the oven. The callow effect was not aided by his sparse moustache and beard: he hadn’t had time to curl and oil them before he’d answered her summons, or perhaps he hadn’t bothered, a further gesture of insolence. He was, she counted back quickly, four-and-ten. A man, yes, but only just. That might make this easier.

She gestured at the cushions beside her. “Sit down. I would speak with you.”

He stayed still a moment before his pride would allow him to slouch closer and lower himself next to Enheduanna in her alcove. “What about?” he asked, a cat’s whisker away from rudeness.

“Our family. You. The future, may the gods give us our wishes and vanquish our enemies as we desire. Tell me, what are the qualities of a great king?”  


Her didactic tone took him somewhat by surprise, but it was also familiar enough to prompt a swift response. Swift words could be dangerous, a lesson he perhaps had not yet learned.

“A great king conquers, he brings back spoil and slaves, he wins the love of men and gods alike. His stores overflow with grain, his temples win him the gods’ favor, and his wives bear him many sons. My father and grandfather have been great kings,” he said piously. “I will be such a one, one day.”

Enheduanna wondered if Naram-Sin knew that her mother – his grandmother – Queen Tashlultum had been captured in one of the wars against Uruk, her new name signaling that she once had been Sargon’s spoil. It had not escaped Enheduanna’s notice that the boy studiously omitted to mention his uncle Rimush, Sargon’s other son and first successor. Rimush the Bloody. Rimush the Flayer. Sargon of Akkad had built an empire by forcing nearly three dozen Sumerian cities under his control, yet Rimush was the one they called cruel, but that was not the reason for Naram-Sin’s forbearance. An epic engraved on a stele had little room for the tale of how one’s father captured the throne by bribing his brother the king’s eunuchs to beat him to death in his bedchamber. Sargon had stabbed the king of Kish through the throat at the start of his ascent, but once a dynasty was established, staining one’s hands with a brother’s blood set an unfortunate precedent, even though few had mourned Rimush, and Naram-Sin’s father Manishtushu had seemed sent by the gods simply by dint of being Sargon the Great’s other son.

“Did you know that your grandfather could neither read nor write?” Enheduanna asked.

Naram-Sin’s jaw dropped. His eyes bulged. His raw-dough face turned crimson.

“Oh yes,” Enheduanna continued, amused at his reaction in spite of her serious purpose in arranging this meeting. “His father was a lowly water-drawer, you know that much. He may have become Sargon of Akkad and had the wisdom to keep scribes to do his writing, priests to recite to him, and counselors to help him shape laws, but he never did pick up a stylus himself. A sword suited his hand much better. When I was young – younger than you are now – and learning to write, he told me that serving as the king of Kish’s cupbearer had required neither mind nor heart, but only steady hands and a tight asshole, for the king would beat him if he spilled wine or failed to ‘interpret the king’s dreams right,’ as the old man liked to call it.” Enheduanna chuckled. “Sargon of Akkad, Sargon of Kish, Sargon the Great was once and in his heart always remained a clever peasant bum-boy.”

“You blaspheme his name!” Naram-Sin seemed torn about what to shout next, starting and breaking off several utterances, his face turning even darker red.

Enheduanna flicked her fingers at him, like shooing off a fly. “Oh pish! Let’s get you a drink before you choke on your own righteousness. What _would_ the House of Sargon do without you to defend all our honor?”

She clapped her hands to summon a slave. Naram-Sin stewed in thunderous silence while they waited for the girl to return with a silver cup of watered wine. He emptied the cup in one drought and thrust it back into the girl’s hand. “Another.”

“Bring me some too,” Enheduanna said, then focused her attention back on Naram-Sim once they were alone again. “Why so enraged, prince? You never knew Sargon, except in the stories told about him. Is he really diminished in your eyes by the knowledge that he was unlettered, or that he could laugh at himself? All the men who ate bread daily before him loved him for being a plain soldier like they. My mother loved him because he was kind to her, when he wasn’t on campaign growing our lands, securing our trade with Ebla or Egypt.”

 _And I loved him_ , Enheduanna thought but kept that part to herself. When he’d made her the high priestess of Inanna, back when her hair was still black and her flesh firm, Sargon and she had had to take on two sets of roles. Once a year, to ensure the coming of the flood waters that would grow the seeds in the ground and keep famine from their doors, the king of Akkad and the Goddess embodied in the high priestess enacted their sacred marriage. At other times, and sometimes even right after the ritual had been consummated, they were father and daughter again. Once, lying spent beside her in the Goddess’ nuptial chamber, Sargon had told Enheduanna: “When you were born, they gave you to me, all bloody like a tiny warrior, and I said, ‘The gods will give me sons yet, but this one will be for Ishtar. I owe Her a tithe, for She has always loved me well. She shall have my firstborn as Her own.’” And he had stroked Enheduanna’s cheek with his finger.

Inanna was the name by which She was called by the people of Sumer even after they were conquered, so that was what Enheduanna called Her too, in her heart and in her writings both. But the Akkadian peasant who became a king had called Her always by Her Akkadian name, Ishtar. The very sound of it, the shape of it in Enheduanna’s mind made her breath catch and her eyes grow damp, the old grief like an old wound, unhealed.

She rubbed her face swiftly with her hand, before Naram-Sin could notice. He was speaking, having mulled over her speech about Sargon and kingship: “What about my uncle, then? And my father? What were they like before they were kings?”  
  
Enheduanna thanked Her Queen that it was at that moment the slave girl came back bearing two cups of wine, for it gave her time to assemble her thoughts, when what she really wanted to do was to perch on the open window overlooking the city and crow like a cockerel, if her aching old joints and back could but stand the acrobatics. The lad was smarter than he’d seemed at first, and quick to catch on! And he wanted power, as did everyone of Sargon’s line.

“Your uncle Rimush was Sargon’s oldest son and would not be content with anything less than the entire empire. His trouble was that, while he was much loved by Anu Who Contains the Whole Universe and by Enlil the Raging Storm, he did not have My Queen on his side. He could roll across the land like a thundercloud and burn rebellious cities to the ground, he could pile up the dead temple-high, but he knew nothing of building or making people love him. Those first years after my father died were…” She drank some wine. “They were hard years on Sumer and Akkad both.”

“My other uncle Shu-Enlil fought Rimush for the throne, didn’t he?” Naram-Sin asked. He must have heard the story before, but he was still enough of a child to want an old tale told to him again.

Enheduanna nodded. “Shu-Enlil fought Rimush. Shu-Enlil lost.” There wasn’t much else to say, apart from the lesson Enheduanna had learned then and Naram-Sin would have to learn in his own time and in his own way: one could survive such a loss. One could even rejoice in it, though Enheduanna had scoured her cheeks with her nails and refused food for three days straight after the news of Shu-Enlil’s death had reached her.

“Is it…” The boy hesitated, and Enheduanna guessed what was coming. “Is it true you fled Ur and sought refuge in Elam?”

Enheduanna nodded again, waited. It took only a moment.

“But _why_?”

He sounded so outraged, she almost laughed, only she was certain it would have come out as a sob. He still believed that the seed of Sargon never ran from a fight.

“You were the high priestess already,” Naram-Sin continued hotly. “Why would you ever leave the Goddess’ house and the city and risk the open road?”

Enheduanna had decided, when she’d resolved to have this conversation with Naram-Sin, to tell him the plain truth.

“Because I had fooled myself into believing that my father would never die. And when he did, and most of the Sumerian cities rose up against us, and my brothers turned on each other like dogs fighting over a carcass, this temple was crammed full of people but we had no food, the wells were running dry, and the gates were being repaired. So I ran, yes, for I did not trust Rimush not to forget how much he needed My Queen’s love.”

Enheduanna slept soundly most nights, but when she didn’t, it was while turning the following question over and over in her head, like a mill wheel grinding her slowly to dust: had Rimush sacked the temple of Inanna in Ur the City of Cities because Enheduanna had fled and left her people defenseless, or would he have done it even if she’d stayed?

The gods could sometimes show one the future, but they never revealed what might have been. What _was_ , was that the temple had held several hundred priests and priestesses, eunuchs and scribes, attendants and slaves, craftsmen and bakers and cooks and weavers. Rimush had put them all to the sword. Only a few had contrived to survive: one scribe had hidden in a giant jar empty of oil, two slaves had clutched each other under a pile of dirty linens, before they’d crept out of the temple and the city under cover of night. Though two perished on the road to Elam, one lived to tell Enheduanna how screams had echoed between the temple compound’s high walls and the thousand stone steps ascending the temple façade to the Goddess’ apartments at the top had glistened red in the sun and teemed with black flies. _My life is devoured_ , Enheduanna wrote in her exile, but she had remained alive; all those others got devoured in her place.

“My father was right to have Rimush killed,” Naram-Sim’s voice broke into Enheduanna’s dark memories. “He shouldn’t have waited nine years, he should have done it at once.”

Enheduanna shook her head. “Manishtushu was a barefaced boy when Rimush secured the throne. You were born one harvest season before Manishtushu took the throne in his turn, you don’t know. You don’t remember any of this.” She hated how she sounded, like a querulous old woman, when she was trying to be a crafty old woman instead.

“I suppose,” Naram-Sim conceded, though he sounded still like he wished his beardless father had ripped his adult brother’s head off just to satisfy Naram-Sin’s disapproving specter, the future looking back on the past from its safe perch.

“I want to ask you something, but I don’t want to get slapped,” Naram-Sin said.

Enheduanna smiled, despite the memories clustering around her like bats. “Risk it, my prince.”

“When Rimush came to Elam, you anointed him king and returned to Ur with him, after what he’d done to your people. Why?”

“My Queen came to me in a dream and told me not to throw away my life. She told me to bide my time, till my revenge ripened and I could pluck it.”

Rimush had besieged Elam, and though that city had rebelled against Akkad half a dozen times in Enheduanna’s lifetime, they had taken her in when she’d come to them practically naked and barefoot. She had already allowed her people in Ur to die, and Rimush’s army had blackened the hillside before the city walls. So Enheduanna had swallowed her rage. She had quelled the storm in her heart. She had swallowed her heart, and she had prostrated herself before Rimush and kissed his feet and lain with him in the sacred marriage in the Elamite temple of Inanna, whom they called Nanaya.

Naram-Sin wanted a different answer, his expression made that much clear, but Enheduanna’s was a complete answer nonetheless.

“My father did kill Rimush eventually,” Naram-Sin said, as though bargaining with himself for a satisfactory answer.

“Yes,” Enheduanna said placidly.

“Rimush was not a good king,” Naram-Sin continued, pursuing the bargain, convincing himself of the right and justness of kinslaying.

Enheduanna shrugged. “Once, after he conquered Lagash, he gifted My Queen a huge tract of their land between the rivers,” she replied. By then, Enheduanna had learned how to feed her repopulated temple, to dig more wells in case of siege or drought, to store grain and oil and wine in the cold cellars. But one gift of land did not wash away old blood or the insult to the Goddess.

“That doesn’t make him a good king,” Naram-Sin said stubbornly.

“That is what I told Manishtushu when he brought me word of Rimush’s frequent drunkenness, the unrest among his wives and eunuchs, the reports of trouble brewing along our borders, with the last rebellion put down not two years earlier.” In truth, all this information had been supplied by Enheduanna’s spies in the palace, but Manishtushu _had_ come to see her and seek her counsel, and he had had the idea to overthrow his brother already, though Enheduanna had been the first one to speak it out loud.

Naram-Sin blinked like an owl, his eyes on Enheduanna’s face. She returned his look, her hands folded in her lap. In her mind’s eye, Inanna walked on top of the high wall around the temple compound, which Enheduanna had built up even higher since her return from Elam. Radiant of Heart, She held them all in the palm of Her hand, like a cup of wine. Like a javelin.

“Manishtushu has been a good enough king,” Enheduanna said softly, “but he is no Sargon. Sargon killed the king of Kish with his own two hands. Manishtushu bribed court eunuchs to be his weapons, and the idea wasn’t even his.” The truth was still the truth with a little flourish to spare the boy’s feelings. “You know I describe him right.”

“I know,” Naram-Sin whispered, pale as a corpse. “I just don’t know why you are telling me.”

Enheduanna studied him: a bird with a broken wing brought to her to heal or – not.

“You have never known your father’s absence, for he has been blessed by the gods with few rebellions and some easy conquests. But a man can eat too much at a feast, and an empire is like grain – you may gather a lot of it, but it will forever be slipping through your fingers. Elam is a whisker away from rebellion again, and so are the cities to the north, and Manishtushu is a soft man because he’s had a soft reign. An empire is not held together with softness alone. My Queen is She Who Rides the Beasts, not just She Who Makes Them Rut in the Fields.” Enheduanna adopted a pious mien and made the gesture to ward off the evil eye. “By the time Manishtushu gets summoned before Lady Ereshkigal, may the gods grant him a long life, his softness will leave you emperor of an ash heap. A _small_ ash heap.”

“I’m not…” Naram-Sin’s voice rose, broke. He swallowed hard and whispered, still reedy with youth: “I don’t know how.”

Even a weak king’s son wanted everything and didn’t flinch from the act, only from the deciding on it. Enheduanna held out her hand to him. “I will guide you and advise you. My Queen will watch over you, and you will be Her husband.”

His eyes round, his nose wrinkling a bit, the boy put his hand in hers. Enheduanna knew what he was thinking: the young could be so squeamish, but a sacred marriage was an obligation, and even an old body could be warm and pleasant enough when the full moon shone through the open roof of Inanna’s nuptial chamber.

She folded her fingers around Naram-Sin’s and tugged on his hand a little, to get his attention: “What would you do first, once you are king?”  
  
He had to think for only as long as it took Enheduanna to inhale and exhale once, slowly. “Make the kings of Sumer bow before me and secure the king of Elam’s loyalty.”

The king of Elam had a daughter, and a young king needed to wed and bear sons – that too would secure his position. Enheduanna started to nod, smiling, but the boy wasn’t done:

“Then, with the eastern border secure, I would lead an expedition into the mountains. Those Guti keep raiding our fields, stealing our women and cattle. They can bow before me, or they can perish.”

Apparently Enheduanna’s lesson about gathering up too many lands would bear some repeating, and it was just like a green boy of the lowlands to imagine that taking the war into the mountains would be an easy path to glory. This one would need watching, more so than any other king of Enheduanna’s family.

She rose from her cushions with some effort: her back ached in the mornings, and she’d been sitting still too long while they talked. She was not too proud to accept Naram-Sin’s proffered arm and lean on him a little as they walked slowly by the window and out of Enheduanna’s chamber. Inanna the Radiant watched them from the pale and rosy sky: the last star of morning winking at them in mischief.

“You will need a royal title,” Enheduanna said. “Your grandfather styled himself the King of Akkad and of Kish, your uncle and your father were Kings of the World, now let me see…”

She pondered her options. _King of the Sea and the…_ No, the boy was not a fish. Not _King of the Mountains and the Plains_ either, best not to encourage his foolish idea to try bringing the Gutian lands to heel. _King of the…_

“King of the Four Quarters,” Naram-Sin said, clear as a brass bell.

He wouldn’t meet Enheduanna’s eye when she peered at him. He’d thought of his future title already. Enheduanna wondered what else he might have cooked up late at night by the burning bonfire of his ambition, for all his seeming discomfort with her proposal to continue the family tradition of kinslaying and violently seizing the throne. This one would require very careful watching, oh yes. Enheduanna would need to keep her aging wits honed and sharp for as long as she could draw breath and give praise to her Goddess.

“We received a shipment of olive oil from Ebla yesterday. Sargon’s trade routes continue to serve us well,” Enheduanna said conversationally, a lesson wrapped in small talk. “You’ll break your fast with me before you return to the palace. We have much to do.”

**Author's Note:**

> I cribbed some lines in this fic as well as its title from [Enheduanna’s poetry](http://classicalarthistory.weebly.com/library/enheduanna-poems).


End file.
